Yesterday while I was driving home, I got a call from a phone number I didn’t recognize. Caller ID told me that the number, 425-448-5215, was from Kirkland WA, so there was a chance it was a call I wanted and I answered. I was greeted by this recording:
Hello, this is the Hope and Prayer Center Ministry, calling today to see if you need urgent prayer. If you would like to have someone from our center pray for you please press one. If you would like to no longer hear from this place, press 3. 
Hmmm, I thought to myself. Do I need urgent prayer? A quick glance around the car made me doubt that I did. I had apple slices and a half-full venti iced tea from Starbucks, so my nutritional needs were met. It was a sunny beautiful evening so I was able to have the window down as I poked along in traffic, and my car has heated seats so my back felt nice. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t have minded being able to part the traffic the way Moses parted the Red Sea (totally had to check Google to make sure I was right about it being Moses who did that) so that I could drive straight home instead of being tailgated by some angry soccer mom in a Toyota Sienna. That would’ve been cool. But, is that a misuse of an offer of urgent prayers? I suspected that indeed it was.
I am far from a religious person. I don’t care if other people want to pray or believe in that kind of stuff, but it’s just not for me. Over the years,expressing this view has led to people I don’t particularly like anyway informing me that they will pray for me to have a change of heart so that I will think like them, even though I’m perfectly fine with thinking the way I already do. I supposed that maybe the Hope and Prayer Center Ministry would think I need urgent prayers to soften my cold godless heart so that I can accept their lord and savior before I meet an untimely death, especially since there was every possibility that the car in front of me could check up and I could then be run over by the soccer mom in the Sienna when she didn’t have time to stop due to being about six millimeters from my rear bumper. But, because it was an automated call instead of a live person, I could not ask them if they sensed that I was both a heathen and in mortal danger and if that was what prompted them to call me for a last-ditch effort to save my soul.
Then I began to wonder if the call was even really from the Hope and Prayer Center Ministry, because if it truly was, why would their opt-out message say “If you no longer want to hear from this place, press 3” instead of something like “To decline this offer of urgent prayers and instead go straight to hell, press 3”? Like, at least drive home what the consequences will be if I don’t press 1!
Admittedly, I forgot about the call pretty quickly once it ended and I resumed listening to podcasts for the remainder of my drive, but I remembered today when I checked my phone’s call log after noticing that I had a missed call (it was not from anyone else who wanted to pray for me). I googled 425-448-5215 and found that the Hope and Prayer Center Ministry is actually a big ol’ scam (gasp!! God, how could you allow this??) and if you press 1, you then start getting subsequent calls asking for donations to the prayer center. There are even pending lawsuits against the leader of the organization, a dude named Prophet Manasseh Jordan. I looked him up on Facebook and found that he has a nice little flock of sheep that seems to be comprised of Trump supporters who love Jesus and can’t spell. The comments on his posts are a mix of people who love his messages and people who are pissed off that they keep getting phone calls and emails hitting them up for money, and I actually think those people are the dumbest of all for actually thinking to themselves, Yes sirree, I do need me some urgent prayers! and pressing 1 and then being shocked when the whole thing is just a way to then hit them up for money. I would really love to know if they are the same people who stuff that collection basket full of crisp bills every Sunday, or tithe 10% of their income to their churches, because I’m betting they are and I find it hilarious that they see no difference between hitting people up for money in a building and hitting them up for it on the phone. It all buys you into heaven the same, doesn’t it?
I did press 3 so I wouldn’t hear from “this place” again, and I blocked the phone number for good measure to ward off any subsequent offers for the finest prayers money can buy. And if my views on organized religion have pissed you off just know that you can call the Hope and Prayer Center Ministry and they’ll pray for me for the low introductory price of $147.
 
 

Western Washington has been hit with crazy amounts of snow over the last week. There’s currently about nine inches of the white fluffy stuff on my back deck with more coming down, and due to hills and lack of road-clearing machine things we are pretty much just told to stay off the roads as much as possible until Snowmageddon has passed. People are taking it very seriously and the grocery stores look like people were stocking up to be housebound for months instead of for a week or so. It was so busy when Bill and I went out on Thursday to grocery shop that we waited in line for over half an hour to pay for our stuff.

I snapped this photo while we waited in line, in the produce section, because the line was so long it snaked along the front of the store and into the produce. See all the empty spaces where bread should be? I’m thinking a lot of people fell off the Keto/Whole 30 wagon and stocked up on some nice comforting carbs.
Since we’ve been housebound for days now, I’ve spent a lot of time watching tv and reading things on the Internet to amuse myself. If it doesn’t stop fucking snowing I may make a list of my favorite shows and movies watched during Snowmaggedon, but I’m not quite bored enough yet for list-posting. Emphasis on the word yet.
On Friday, it had just started snowing in earnest when I came across a randomly-shared listing of a house in Maple Glen PA. I clicked on it because it vaguely looked like Kevin McAllister’s house and I thought the price tag of $750k seemed more than reasonable for this sprawling 5,029-square-foot abode, and because I am a real estate junkie and love looking at house listings. I’ve mentioned before that I follow multiple old-house accounts on Instagram, and many times in my life I have visited open houses when I was definitely not in the market for a house. I thought I had seen it all, until I opened the listing on my Redfin app and read the property description.
“50 Shades of Maple Glen: a suburban home with a sexy twist”
Uh, what now??
I began scrolling through the listing’s 48 photos, trying frantically to see what the hell that meant. My thoughts went something like this: oooh, lovely giant kitchen, nice brick fireplace, big bedrooms, cool in-home gym, OHMYGAWDISTHATASEXSWING??
Spoiler alert: yeah, it totally fucking was.

I am not a prude by any means. I had just never seen a house with a full sexy-time basement (dungeon) on a Redfin listing before.
I did what anyone would do and immediately texted the link to a few of my friends, the ones who would be as amused as I was. Redfin must have reconsidered its stance on sex basements, because it quickly removed the racy photos and naughty listing description, but Zillow still had the photos so I took screen shots of them, and it’s a good thing I did because Zillow has since taken them down too.

I read a particularly hilarious comment on one post about the house from someone who initially thought that the cage under the bed was a dog kennel, which made me laugh quite a lot.
I’m actually really happy that whoever owns this house seems to have had a lot of fun there. Good on you, people of Maple Glen. I did have questions when I discovered that the house was posted on AirBNB with the sex dungeon or basement or whatever on prominent display as the main selling point, mainly around how one goes about sanitizing that room after guests rent it out.

My only concern now is that my top-floor condo has zero sex basements and I hope this doesn’t hurt my property values.

One of my favorite things about the Internet is that it is the place where many pictures of cute cats and puppies are, and also funny memes with lots of sarcasm and just the right amount of swear words to give me a good chuckle when I’m feeling like I might actually say out loud “NOT bless you!” to the guy over the cubicle wall from me who scream-sneezes on the regular (I’m sorry, but at a certain point the volume of a sneeze becomes a choice and it is not one I support). One of my least favorite things about the Internet is that it gives a platform for stupid people and their nonsense and while being stupid is probably not a choice like scream-sneezing is, it can be very harmful when allowed to run rampant.
Today’s case in point is my newest enemy who doesn’t know me, Anthony William, and all of his stupid celery-juicing. I was blissfully ignorant of all things celery, juices and otherwise, until I started seeing stuff on Instagram about how life-changing this stuff apparently was and learned that ol’ Tony over here is the one that is spearheading this new “wellness” trend. According to this dude, if you juice celery and drink it on an empty stomach you will get magical powers and be the wizardiest wizard that Hogwarts has ever seen, or something like that. I looked him up on Amazon and found out that he refers to himself as the Medical Medium, because I guess why the hell not, so he’s over here talking to the ancient spirits and apparently they’re super into the celery juice and want him to tell us mere mortals all about it. His ‘About’ section on Amazon informed me that he “was born with the unique ability to converse with a high-level spirit who provides him with extraordinarily accurate health information that’s often far ahead of its time”, which loosely translated means “figured out that he can capitalize on his conversations with his imaginary friend by telling people to put celery in their KitchenAid Blenders and then drink the sludge because healthy!”, if I’m reading my crazy-to-English dictionary right.
On the most basic level, I guess celery juicing isn’t the very stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of, because intake of vegetables isn’t a bad thing. Sure, by juicing the celery you’re pulverizing out all the parts of it that make it the healthiest and best for you, but people who don’t eat any vegetables at all who start drinking celery juice are still going to experience a net positive. It’s not the encouraging people to drink celery pulp that I have an issue with. What bothers me is that Anthony William, who has no medical expertise whatsoever, is parading around as someone who can give advice on curing things from strep throat to cancer, when in fact he’s just a dude with an Internet connection and possibly schizophrenia. And if people actually believe they’re going to get well by following his advice, potentially choosing his methods over traditional medical treatments from actual professionals, then he is causing real harm.
At best, Anthony William is insane, and at worst he’s a calculating con-man who is preying on the naïve, the desperate, and the sick. Although the end result is no less harmful, I so want him to be the former, because the latter is just so sinister and horrible. Either way, his nonsense is driving me to consult with MY spirit of choice….tequila.
 

On the social medias this month, the ten-year challenge is all the rage. The challenge consists of posting photos of oneself in 2009 alongside pictures taken more recently, and I think that the only people who are doing it are the ones who really don’t look any different or the ones who finally figured out the right haircut for their face shape and have stopped wearing eyeliner around their entire eyes and looking like the guys in Good Charlotte and as a result they actually look much better now than they did ten years ago. I have not taken part in this challenge for a few reasons, such as I don’t really have many photos of myself from 2009, and because 2009 was not a good year for me hairstyle-wise, and because I do not think I have any photos of myself from 2019 whatsoever. I don’t really like pictures of myself because my eyes always look tired and squinty like I either just smoked a bowl or haven’t slept for weeks, and because when I smile my left eye forgets how to eye and it will be half-closed and weird-looking and appears much smaller than my right one and then all I can see when I look at photos is my right eye which appears freakishly big but it isn’t, the left one is just being stupid and making the right one look bad. All I can really do to mitigate this is to not smile and hope for the best (and also later be subjected to “you need to smile more” comments from people who do not know the struggle of having an eye that does not know how to eye), or better yet, just not take pictures of myself.

To me, the ten-year challenge is a reminder of just how quickly time passes, because in my mind 2009 doesn’t actually feel all that terribly long ago. For the first time in my life, this year I have found myself particularly preoccupied with my age. I think this is because I’m turning thirty-five in July, putting me much closer to mid-thirties than early-thirties, which means that all too soon I’m going to be in my LATE thirties and that shit is a little scary.
This whole worrying-about-being-old thing is new to me, because in my twenties I had an annoying coworker who would constantly remind me of how I looked so young and would exclaim not-helpful things like “How on earth did you convince them to let you work here when you’re only 12?!?” Other people in my life were more subtle about it, but enough people would tell me that I looked so much younger than I was that I felt pretty confident that by the time I was in my forties I would just look like what other people looked like in their twenties. Now though, I rarely see myself in a mirror when I don’t look sleep-deprived and squishy in places that used to be firm, and I would be lying if I said that part of my desire to lose weight this year has nothing to do with a faint hope of recapturing some of my youthful look. I had never thought that I would be using the word “haggard” to describe my appearance, and yet here we are. And this is in spite of the fact that I now a drink a ton of water every day and try to get enough sleep and wear moisturizer and sunscreen and actually take off my makeup every night before I go to bed.
Instead of posting photos of myself ten years ago and now, I would like to instead think about how much more awesome my life is now than it was in 2009. Back then, I still lived in California, I had the afore-mentioned not-great hairstyle, I was working a job I hated, I was in a relationship that didn’t make me feel safe or fulfilled, and I felt rather stuck in life. I threw myself into activities like volunteering so that I could do something to make me feel good and also to fill up my time so I did not have any free moments to contemplate the stuck feelings. If I had actually paused to think about it, I would have had to admit to myself that overall I was pretty unhappy. And so when I finally did pause, I began making major changes. I moved to Washington, got jobs at work that I liked much better, and surrounded myself with people who loved me and cheered me on and helped me feel comfortable just being me. I learned to end relationships that didn’t make me feel good, paving the way to the incredible marriage I now enjoy with my husband. My late twenties and early thirties have been all about figuring out what works for me. I may not look better than I did in 2009, but my life most certainly does.